Digital upgrade at Crown Point

Standing with the new GenBand communications server/softswitch at Crown Point Telephone Company are, from left, President Shana Macey, installer John Kratz, and Vice President for Operations Anthony Macey.

Photo by Lohr McKinstry

CROWN POINT – A room full of electronic circuits has been replaced with a digital switch the size of a small air-conditioner at Crown Point Telephone Company.

The $215,000 upgrade will increase reliability and efficiency of calls and enable new services, Telephone Company President Shana Macey said.

“We had 700 lines transferred in five minutes,” she said. “We did it around midnight. You go from a whole room to a box. We were very busy.”

The new switch is a GenBand C15, a state-of-the-art softswitch, she said. A softswitch provides call-control intelligence for establishing, maintaining, routing and terminating sessions in broadband telephone networks.

The power savings with the new switch is excellent, Vice President of Operations Anthony Macey said.

“We cut power consumption by 50 percent,” he said. “We’re keeping up with technology. Now that we’re transitioning to fiber-optic (line connections) to the home, we can support that with the new switch as well.”

The C15 switch is designed to support line migration from analog to digital telephony, according to Frisco, Texas-based GenBand.

The old switch was installed in 1990, and there have been lots of advances since then, he said.

The future of business communications is in VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) telephone systems, he said, which use broadband telephony for increased services.

“There are a lot of things we can do now,” Anthony Macey said.

One of the new features of the switch is NotifyPlus, which can call all lines with emergency messages, such as school closings, evacuations or water/sewer main breaks. NotifyPlus can make 96 simultaneous calls to deliver a pre-recorded message using the C15 switch.

Multi-port conference calling, video, voice, text and email messaging, number portability, line diagnostics, and Enhanced-911 data are other features in the new device.

The switch uses SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, a communications tool for signaling and controlling multimedia communication sessions. The most common applications of SIP are in Internet telephony for voice and video calls, as well as instant messaging, using Internet Protocol networks.

The switch came with the services of GenBand installer John Kratz, who guided installation and is around for awhile to fix any issues that may crop up.

The Telephone Company also sent two people to a three-week school on maintaining the new switch, Mr. Macey said.

Crown Point Central School can take advantage of the NotifyPlus feature, Shana Macey said.

“School transportation is a huge issue,” she said. “If there’s a two hour school delay, and you have to get a sitter, you need to know.”